


late nights and bothered minds

by meowlmittens



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, idk you guys this fic is all over the place tbh, in which sam decides to actually acknowledge that 2x22 happened, more than that-less than 5k, nat ilu i hope you can forgive me for posting this so late
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-07 00:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4242327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meowlmittens/pseuds/meowlmittens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye just wants to have some fun with her friends. And drink. She wants to drink a lot. And maybe play some games.</p>
<p>Written for the More Than That - Less Than 5k fic exchange on Tumblr. For Natalie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	late nights and bothered minds

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so this is for Natalie, who wanted "a game of truth or dare that leads to a complicated/memorable 7 minutes in heaven". Admittedly, this is not my best. But I tried. I hope you still love me after this, Nat.

No one’s really sure what compelled Skye and Lance to go out and make a liquor run at ten in the evening, but when the two SHIELD agents returned to base, Skye had several bottles of vodka in her embrace, and Hunter was carrying two packs of beer in each hand. The two of them seemed to already be some bottles of beer along, and as soon as they set all the newly-purchased alcohol down, took it upon themselves to drag their coworkers to the kitchen to get them on the same level.

“Does Coulson knows about this?” Bobbi asks skeptically as Hunter tries to wrap her fingers around a bottle of beer. Though from the look on her face, it seems she already knows the answer.

“Coulson won’t mind,” Skye says dismissively, rummaging through the cupboards looking for the shot glasses she swore she had found once. “He’s too busy.”

“Doesn’t that mean we should be busy too?” Mack counters.

“We _have_ been busy,” Hunter counters back. “We’ve been busy for months. S’time to take a break now, don’t you think?”

“Exactly!” Skye says, her back turned to them. She lets out a little fist pump as she finally locates the shot glasses. She pulls them out, two in each hand, and setting them on the counter. Before she retrieves the other three shot glasses, she turns to Bobbi and Mack who are standing—more like towering, she thinks—in the doorway still not looking entirely convinced that an impromptu drinking session was a good idea (as if they’ve never done this before).

Suddenly, it occurs to Skye that something is missing from this scenario. “Where are Fitzsimmons?”

* * *

 

Leopold Fitz is not a morning person.

He’s not the type of guy who sleeps through the whole morning just to avoid the event altogether, but he certainly doesn’t enjoy waking up nearly as much as hunkering down for the evening. Shockingly though, normal operating hours and a full eight hours of sleep is not something included in the SHIELD employee package; and though Fitz has pulled his fair share of late nights and all-nighters since the Academy, it never altered his true sleeping habits. When there was a chance to sleep, he took it.

Those chances were rare, especially these last few months; so when Fitz wrapped up his current project ahead of schedule, he wasted no time in clocking out and heading straight to his bunk. A full night’s rest. Who knew such a thing still existed?

Leopold Fitz loves his sleep.

“Wake up, Fitzy!”

He’d only been asleep for half an hour and already Skye was yanking his arm upwards. He should have known. He should have known that sleep was too good be true.

“Skye, what the hell?” Fitz mumbles, only half-opening his eyes as if to make a point. His eyes have been closed for a total of four hours all week. He doesn’t intend to open them again for a while.

“Get up,” Skye answers. “We’re gonna drink.”

_That’s_ supposed to sound more appealing at a time like this?

Fitz yanks his arm out of Skye’s grasp with a grunt, and turns over on his bed, his back to her. “Get out.”

“Oh come on, Fitz,” Skye says, almost sounding like a whine. She goes for Fitz’s shoulder and shakes it. “Come and unwind with the group.”

Trying to make a point, Fitz’s only answer is a short grunt. He _is_ unwinding, just not with the group. He takes the pillow he’d been embracing and holds it firmly over his head, as if that were enough to shield him from Skye’s persistence.

But Skye being Skye, she’s relentless in her pursuit to annoy him out of bed. Fitz suspects it may have something to do with the alcohol he already smells on her.

“Bloody hell Skye, why don’t you just go ahead without me?”

“And where’s the fun in that?”

_Shit_ , Fitz thinks. That wasn’t Skye who answered. She had brought reinforcements. And by the sound of it, she had brought Hunter with her, who was just as much of a shit when drunk as anyone.

Fitz curses into his pillow. He doesn’t deserve this injustice.

* * *

 

Jemma was awake.

While everyone else seemed to be working extra lately, Jemma’s responsibilities as head of the science division hadn’t changed all too much. Among everyone on the team, she’s clocked in the lowest number of all-nighters in the last three months (Fitz having the highest count by far, thanks to the cloaking and rebuilding of the Bus that Coulson had asked him to take care of) and is the only one who seemed to have a consistent (and reasonable) bedtime and waking hour. She’d turn in to her bunk at a reasonable time almost every night, with, supposedly, the intention of sleeping.

She never did.

The first few weeks, she had tried everything short of taking sleeping pills to help her sleep, but nothing worked. Every night she would lay in her bunk, willing sleep to come, but she remained wide awake and staring at the ceiling. When she was lucky, and stretched thin in exhaustion, the most she could get was a few hours of slumber. After a while she had resigned herself to spend her sleepless nights reading, watching whatever was on Netflix, and cursing the irony that she was the only one who didn’t have extra work, despite the fact that she was the one who needed it.

A quiet knock on her door startles Jemma out of her staring contest with the ceiling. No one ever bothered her at this time of night, they were all usually too busy.

“Come in.”

Bobbi’s head pops up from the doorway. “Did I wake you?”

Jemma shakes her head and sits up on the bed. “What do you need?”

“Nothing,” Bobbi answers, giving Jemma a familiar look. It’s the same knowing look she gives someone in interrogation when they’re hiding something. “Skye and Hunter are back, and they brought drinks. You wanna join?”

She was losing to the ceiling anyway. “Sure. I’ll be out in a bit.”

Jemma makes it down to the dining area just in time to see Skye dragging Fitz by the arm as he trudged bleary-eyed behind her. She lets him go once they’re through the threshold and he goes, half awake, almost instinctually, to sit next to Jemma. “Dragged you out of bed too, huh?”

She gives him a little shrug. “I was awake anyway.”

“Alright,” Skye says excitedly, and Jemma quickly turns away from Fitz to watch Skye enthusiastically pour shots to the faint sounds of obnoxious pop music thrumming from her iPod speakers on the counter. She completely misses the look he gives her when she mentions that she had been awake when Bobbi came for her.

* * *

 

Two and half hours, two empty bottles of vodka, and two packs of beer later, everyone was thoroughly and wonderfully buzzed. They had pushed the table aside to sit on the floor (no one remembers whose idea it was), and Skye’s music seemed to be blaring louder now.

“You know, this reminds me of those parties I used to go to in high school,” Bobbi said, her torso leaning against Hunter’s side.

“You went to normal high school?” Skye asked, with a little too much astonishment.

“Of course I did,” Bobbi answers. “It’s not like SHIELD just took me when I was a kid and trained me from childhood.”

“Don’t they?” Hunter quips, and Bobbi playfully swats his arm.

“I joined when I was nineteen; so yeah, before that, I went to a regular school.”

“Huh.” There’s a thoughtful look on Skye’s face as she takes another sip of her beer. Sober, that look could mean serious contemplation; but Skye was currently very drunk, which meant that her thought process was going a lot differently tonight. “You know what would make this party _really_ high school?”

Varying expressions of “what?” and “this isn’t a party” sounded off in the room as Skye’s signature grin of slightly-intoxicated-mischief crept up her face. Without another word, the hacker gets up off the floor to grab one of the empty vodka bottles on the counter.

“No,” Bobbi says, shaking her head in amusement as Skye sets the bottle on the floor.

“Yes!” Skye eagerly replies. “Truth or dare, you guys.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lance grumbles.

“Excuse him,” Mack says with an eyeroll. “He’s got three drunk stages.”

“Fun drunk, grumpy drunk, and self-pitying drunk,” Bobbi continues. “And he’s reached the grumpy drunk stage. But he’s got a point though, isn’t truth or dare a bit childish?”

“So is drinking on the floor in the middle of the night with pop music playing in the background,” Skye says.

“Which was _your_ idea,” Fitz quips.

Skye just shrugs. “Technicalities.” She beckons the group to move closer. A few of them—the boys—are carrying disapproving looks, but they all comply anyway, and move so that they’re all sitting in a circle around the bottle. “Come on you guys. We’re drunk, we’re loosening up, this’ll be fun.”

“Not all of us are as drunk as you though,” Fitz smirks.

“Yeah well, we can’t all have Scottish-level alcohol tolerance or whatever it is,” Skye says. She then gestures to the bottle. “So who wants to go first?”

“You know,” Jemma pipes up, “I’ve never played truth or dare like this before.”

“Then you should have the honor,” Skye says. Jemma, buzzed enough to feel a bit excited at the idea, leans forward to start the game.

The bottle neck lands on Skye, who giggles in the way only a drunk person can, and says “truth.”

“Alright,” Jemma says. But then the pause grows longer and longer, until Jemma finally says, “I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything.”

“Just ask the first question that pops into your head,” Skye says encouragingly, pouting with impatience. But Jemma just shrugs. She’s at a loss on what to ask. It’s Hunter who chimes in.

“Ever had a threesome?”

Skye answers without missing a beat. “Yes.”

He raises his near-empty bottle to her at that, looking clearly impressed, but not keen for more details. Skye leans forward, taking her turn to spin the bottle, which coincidentally lands on Hunter.

“Truth.”

“Craziest thing you’ve ever done?” Skye asks.

“Oh that’s easy,” Hunter says, and half the people in the room already know what he’s going to say. “Marriage.”

Everyone else in the room groans, except for Bobbi, who makes it a point to roll her eyes and smack Hunter in the back of the head. Hunter grumbles something along the lines of “this is exactly why,” before reaching over to the bottle in the center.

* * *

 

By what seems like the seventh or eighth round of truth or dare, Fitz is ready to call it a night. He’s managed to stay for a sufficient amount of time with only mild complaining, and is drunk enough to manage his way back to his bunk and pass out without incident. Just thinking about his bunk makes him feel more tired. He can feel his bed calling to him, and he intends to answer that call.

He waits until Skye and Bobbi are discussing mid-question so that their resident Inhuman is distracted enough not to notice him stand and leave. He’s halfway to the door before he gets caught.

“Woah, were’re you going, Turbo?”

He should have known he couldn’t just leave without struggle.

Fitz turns to Mack and the rest of the group and awkwardly scratches the back of his head. “Uh… Just, uh, y’know… Going to, uhm… the bathroom.”

Now, Fitz knows he’s not the worst liar in the room, but the alcohol has slowed his thought process down just enough to make him a bad one. No one believes the excuse, especially not Skye, who’s rolling her eyes and already standing up to pull Fitz back towards the group. Frankly, he doesn’t understand why she’s been holding him hostage in the first place.

“Nice try, Fitzy,” she says, dragging him by the arm and pulling at his favourite jumper to get him to sit back down in the circle. She makes him sit next to her this time, to make escape futile.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he groans out loud. He thinks he’d have more tact if he wasn’t so drunk and tired. (He wouldn’t.)

“Because you’ve been working the most, out of all of us, and we’ve barely seen you outside of the lab or the garage thanks to that,” Skye says matter-of-factly. “Besides, you’ve barely been playing.”

“Maybe that’s the bottle trying to tell you something.”

Skye rolls her eyes again, but her mood goes straight back to cheerful and laughing (she has the craziest mood swings when she’s drunk). “Tell you what? I’ll spin the bottle, and if it doesn’t land on you, you’re free to call it a night. If it _does_ land on you, you have to stay until the last person passes out.”

He’s drunk—drunk and desperate to go to sleep. It’s the only way to explain how he misses the mischievous glint in Skye’s eyes. “Fine.”

Skye claps giddily and reaches over to spin. Fit watches the bottle and finds that it’s spinning a little too long for his liking. He wants to get this over with already, because in a game like this, the odds show that it’s unlikely for the bottle to land on him exactly when Skye wants it to. He’ll be back in his bunk in just a few minutes.

His odds, however, are not in his favor.

The bottle does land on him, and the rest of the group cheers, much to Fitz’s chagrin.

“So,” Skye says, turning to him with a triumphant shit-eating grin on her face. Fitz hates it. “Truth or dare?”

Shoulders slumping, Fitz grumbles the word “dare” in reply. He’s not in the mood to deal with any personal prodding tonight, especially not at this second.

“Excellent,” Skye claps. “I dare you to...” She pauses (mostly for dramatic effect, Fitz thinks) and her eyes flit around the room, around their circle, and then back to him. The shit-eating grin returns. “I dare you to spend seven minutes in the pantry with the next person the bottle lands on.”

“’S a little unfair to impose that dare on someone else too, don’t you think?” Fitz says defensively. He doesn’t like where this is going.

So Skye turns to the rest of the group. “Does anyone object to the idea?”

To no one’s surprise, and Fitz’s apparent disappointment, everyone else seems too buzzed to care. So they all nod yes and giggle at the idea of doing seven minutes in heaven at their age, with Fitz.

Fitz reaches for the bottle in defeat, and as it spins he quickly assesses his options. He’s not likely to make out with any of them, but he definitely hasn’t hung around Bobbi enough to make seven minutes in a small, dark space alone with her not be awkward. Lance would probably drink quietly with him if he said that’s what he wanted to do. He wonders if he and Mack would even fit in the pantry together. Skye would probably be his most talkative potential companion. And then there’s…

The bottle lands on Jemma.

Lance snorts. Mack and Bobbi share knowing look. And Skye… Skye is actually rubbing her palms together like a cartoon villain, looking sickeningly pleased with herself.

Fitz dares himself to peek at Jemma’s reaction. She looks nervous, but there’s also another expression on her face that he can’t read (it’s been that way a lot lately) and it’s what makes the pit of his stomach wish it could hollow itself out (or maybe it’s the alcohol consumption).

Skye wastes no time in grabbing Fitz by the collar and leading him to the food pantry. From the corner of his eye, he can see Jemma stand herself, oddly not objecting to this whole childish scenario.

“Okay,” Skye says once they’re both in place inside the pantry. “I’m gonna assume that you’ve never been to a middle school party, so here are the rules: you have to stay in there for seven minutes. No coming out. And you can do whatever you want while you’re both inside.” She punctuates this with a wiggle of her eyebrows, and Fitz wants the ground to swallow him whole. “Aaaaand that’s it! Have fun you two.

And just like that, Skye closes the pantry door in his face.

* * *

 

Jemma has no idea how or why she’s been caught in this bizarre set of circumstances, but here they are. She didn’t think she and Fitz would ever get stuck in a small box with no escape again, especially not like this.

She doesn’t remember what had happened to her. Her last memory is getting swallowed by the giant alien rock (they still don’t know if it has a name), and then coming out of it covered in strange black goo. By the time it had released her, two months had already passed.

When she returned, Fitz was the first person she saw. She could trace the lines of worry on his face, the dark bags under his eyes, and his hands were shaking as he struggled to help her sit upright on the floor.

She didn’t see much of him after that.

It was both their faults, really. There might be two months missing from her mind, but she remembers clearly what she had missed in those two months. Dinner. They had made plans to go out to dinner. Together. Someplace nice. Just the two of them. And when she had returned she had gotten swept away by her own division as her own employees ran tests on her; and after that she had to catch up on work, on the rest of the team.

(They wouldn’t let it on, but she knew that they still had her under observation—unofficially, of course; her friends were just concerned.)

Fitz, on his part, had already been swimming in work when she returned—work that he had neglected when she went missing. He had dedicated pretty much all of his time trying to get her back. Now that she was, Coulson had him working double-time to make up for the two months lost. The longer he worked, the harder it somehow became to bring up The Dinner That Never Was.

And so, a month later, they still haven’t talked about it. Their daily activities consisted almost entirely of work. They were amicable when they ate with the rest of the team, of course, but they rarely stayed in the same place alone together; because they both knew that being alone together meant that they would finally have to talk about the things that had and hadn’t happened.

Here they were then, finally alone.

“So,” Jemma says, taking Fitz out of his reverie. She hasn’t said a word since she found the bottle pointing in her direction. She was too busy gauging Fitz’s reaction, which, frankly, didn’t look very encouraging. “Anything we want to do, huh?”

“Yeah, like we can do much in this space,” Fitz quips. “Should’ve brought my beer with me,” he grumbles to himself.

She snorts at that. “Hiding behind a bottle, that’s not like you at all.” There’s only a hint of sarcasm in her tone, but he catches it and his lips twitch just the slightest.

The lull of silence in their conversation rings at Jemma’s ears. Awkward silences have happened a lot with Fitz in the past year, but she’s still not used to it. She’s not used to feeling the need to fill empty spaces, not used to picking at her own words before speaking them, not with him.

“I haven’t seen you much lately,” she finally says. She figures the tension can’t get any worse, so she should just go for it.

It catches him off his guard. “Yeah, um, well, ‘s like what Skye’s said, Coulson’s been working everyone extra lately.”

She nods. “Yeah, especially you.”

There’s a beat where he decides how to take that comment. He knows where she’s going with this, she can tell. So he just nods in agreement. “Definitely. ‘S only fair, though. I haven’t really gotten much done til recently.”

Jemma nods too. “Yeah, Skye told me about that.”

“Did she?”

She nods again. She’s about to speak again when he beats her to the punch.

“How have you been sleeping?”

The question just it knocks her off her guard. It’s such a strange thing to ask, she’s about to say, but nothing comes out of her mouth. It’s not a strange thing to ask, not really.

Fitz takes her silence as a sign to continue. “Did you think no one would notice?”

“I…” she trails off. “I’ve been sleeping fine.”

In what can only be explained as an impulse of drunkenness, Fitz steps closer until he’s standing right in front of her. Jemma can hear her breath audibly hitch as he lifts his hand up to cup her face. The sudden contact slows her thoughts, so it takes a while to realize what he’s doing when he moves his thumb back and forth on her lower eyelid.

He rubs off just enough of her concealer to make a point, the dark circles surfacing from beneath the once-thick layer of make-up, and then he steps back. Once he’s put a little distance between them, he seems to realize what he’d just done and even in the darkness, she can tell that his skin is flushing. She’s flustered too.

Fitz composes himself quickly though, and the concern drips from his voice as soon as he does. “Have you been sleeping at all?”

“No,” she admits, redirecting her gaze anywhere other than Fitz. There’s no point in lying to him; he can always tell.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Jemma sighs. “Honestly, I’ve tried everything. I just… I close my eyes but I can’t rest. I haven’t been able to since—“

“—since you got back,” he completes, nodding in understanding.

“Yeah,” she nods back. It’s now or never, Jemma thinks, so she takes a deep breath before continuing the conversation. “We never… we never really talked about… what happened—what was supposed to happen if I hadn’t been swallowed by a giant alien rock.”

The pantry is such a tight space that she can hear his breathing change. “Yeah, no, uh…” He’s fidgeting, and staring at the floor. “We don’t need to talk about that.”

“I want to,” she says quickly, and Fitz looks up at her just as fast. She swallows and keeps going. “It’s just… When I got out, I thought—I thought we would…”

And she pauses. She trails her words off because she’s the one looking at the floor now, and she needs to see his face before she continues. He looks surprised—surprised and hopeful and her throat is dry and _why is she suddenly so nervous?_

“We’d what?” Fitz whispers, his eyes never leaving her own.

“I thought—I’d _hoped_ —that we would reschedule.”

“Reschedule?” he repeats, as if he’s trying to figure out where this is going, as if he doesn’t already know.

“Dinner?” And she smiles as she adds, “Someplace nice?”

He’s silent. He’s silent and he’s staring at her and as the seconds drag on, Jemma’s afraid that maybe she had been wrong. She had assumed that when he had asked her to dinner, he had meant it to be a date. Maybe he did mean it that way, at the time, but what if he’s changed his mind? What if that’s the real reason he’s been avoiding her? What if, in the two months of her disappearance, he’d decided that they were better off not crossing that line?

She hadn’t wanted to cross that line. Not before. And even when she’d said yes the first time, she hadn’t really thought about what a date with Fitz would mean for them. But it’s been a month. And all through that month she’d been mulling over all the possible scenarios if they had actually gone to dinner. She liked those scenarios, she realized. She liked them because they all ended well, and often with a kiss.

Jemma wants to cross that line now.

“Yeah.”

For the first time that night, Fitz is wearing a genuine smile on his face. “Yeah,” he repeats. “We should. Get dinner, I mean. Someplace nice.”

Jemma’s smiling too. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

* * *

 

“It’s been seven minutes,” Bobbi says. “Do you think it worked?”

Just outside the pantry door, Skye spins the vodka bottle around with her hand. She concentrates on the swishing sound the bottle makes as it clatters against the floor, and raises her hand just an inch.

The bottle stops spinning.

Skye grins, twitching her wrist and moving her fingers, she tries to keep her hold on the bottle’s vibrations. She flicks her wrist. The bottle spins slowly.

“I think it did.”


End file.
